About karthequian

I love creating products, and full stack dev comfortable creating things from scratch, and know a bunch about containers, kubernetes, auth and agile development. I live in Austin and organize @devopsdays, @container_days and @cloud_austin. Follow me on twitter.com/iteration1

I recently gave a presentation on “Why to Docker” for the BrightTalk summit. Here’s a list of all the things I talked about. I had a great turnout of over 300 people, and some great questions that followed. Fortunately, I finished a bit early and was able to answer a bunch of the questions (was asked about 30). I’ll end up adding answers to all the questions this weekend!

James, Karthik, and Ernest did a Webcast on Devops State of the Union 2015 talk for the BrightTalk Cloud Summit. It went well! We had 187 attendees on the live feed. In this blog post we’ll add resources discussed during the talk and we will seed the comments below with all the questions we received during the webcast and answer them here – you’re all welcome to join in the discussion.

The talk was intended to be an overview of DevOps, with a bunch of blurbs on current and developing trends in DevOps – we don’t go super deep into any one of them (this was only 40 minutes long!). If you didn’t understand something, we’ve added resource links (we got some questions like “what is a container” and “what is a 12-factor app,” we didn’t have time to go into that in great detail so check some of the links below for more.

One of the interesting sessions at ReInvent was a fireside chat with Werner Vogels., where CEO’s or CTO’s of different companies/startups who use AWS talked about their applications/platforms and what they liked and wanted form AWS. It was a 3 part series with different folks, and I was able to attend the 1st one, but I’m guessing videos are available for the others online. Interesting session, giving the audience a window into the way C level people think about problems and solutions…

First up, the CTO of mongodb…

Lots of people use mongo to store things like user profiles etc for their applications. Mongo performance has gotten a lot better because of ssd’s

Recently funded 150 million, and wanting to build out a lot of tools to be able to administer mongo better.

Apparently being a mongodb dba is a really high paying job these days!

User roles may be available in mongo next year to add more security.

Werner and Eliot want to work together to bring a hosted version of mongo like RDS.

Next up twilio’s Jeff Lawson

Jeff is ex amazon.

Software people want building blocks and not some crazy monolithic thing to solve a problem. Telecom had this issue, and that is why I started Twilio.

Everyone is agile! We don’t have answers up front, but we figure out these answers as we go.

Started with voice, then moved to SMS followed by a global presence. Most customers of ours wanted something that didn’t want boundaries and just wanted an API to communicate with their customers.

Werner: It’s hard to run an API business. Tell us more…
Lawson: It is really hard. Apis are kinda like webapps when it comes to scaling. REST helps a lot from this perspective. Multi tenancy issues gets amplified when you have an API business.

Twilio apparently deploys 20 times a day. Aws really helps with deployment because you can bring brand new environments that look exactly like prod and then tear it down when things aren’t needed.

When it comes to api’s, we write the documentation first and show our customers first before actually implementing the API. Then iterate iterate iterate on the development.

Jeff asks: Make it easier to make vpc up and running.

Next up: Valentino with adroll (realtime bidding)

There’s a data collection pipe which gets like 20 tb of data everyday.

Latency is king: Typically latency is like 50ms and 100ms. This is still a lot for us. I wish we had more transparency when it comes to latency inside aws and otherwise…

Why dynamo db? Didn’t find something simple at the time, and it was nice to be able to scale something without having to worry about it. We had 0 ops people at the time to work on scaling at the time.

Why erlang? You’re a python god.
I started working on Python with the twisted framework. But I realized that Python didn’t fit our use case well; the twisted system worked just as well but it would be complicated to manage it and needed a bit of hacks..

Get the functionality in the hands of customers as soon as possible. It may be feature limited, but it’s in the hands of customers so that they can get feedback as soon as possible. Iterate iterate iterate based on feedback. Different from the old guard where everything is engineering driven and it is unnecessarily complex.

Netflix platform….

Netflix is on stage and we’re taking about the Netflix cloud prizes and talking about the enhancements to the different tools…looks pretty cool, and will need to check them out. There are 14 chaos monkey “tests” to run now instead of just 1 from before.

Cloud prize winners

Werner is back is breaking down the different facets that AWS focuses on:

Performance- measure everything; put performance data in log files that can be mined.

Security

Reliability

Cost

Scalability

Illya sukhar CEO from Parse is on stage now (platform for mobile apps)
-parse data: store data; it’s 5 lines of code instead of a bunch of code.
-push notification

IAM and IAM roles to set boundaries on who can access what.
How to do this from a db perspective?
Apparently you can have fine grained access controls on dynamodb instead of writing your own code.
Each data block is encrypted in redshiftCost:
Talking about how customers are using the spot instances to save $.

Scalability:
We transfer usecase, who take care of transferring large files.

Airbnb on stage with mike curtis, VP of engineering
-350k hosts around the world
-4 millions guests (jan 2013)
-9 million guests today.

Dropcam came on stage after that to talk about how they use the AWS platform. Nothing too crazy, but interestingly more inbound videos are sent to dropcam than YouTube!

Dropcam

They keynote ended with an Amazon Kinesis demo (and a deadmau5 announcement for the replay party), which on the outside looks like a streaming API and different ways to process data on the backend. A prototype of streaming data from twitter and performing analytics was shown to demonstrate the service.

Announcements

RDS for PostgreSQL

New instance types-i2 for much better io performance

Dynamo db- global secondary indexes!!

Federation with saml 2.0 for IAM

Amazon RDS- cross region read replicas!

G2 instances for media and video intensive application

C3 instances are new with fastest processors- 2.8 gig intel e5 v2

Amazon kinesis- real time processing, fully managed. It looks like this will help you solve issues of scalability when you’re trying to build realtime streaming applications. It integrates with storage and processing services.

This was the first talk by @simon_elisha I went to at ReInvent, and was a packed room. It was targeted towards developers going from inception of an app to growing it to 10 million users. Following are the notes I took…

– We will need a bigger box is the first issue, when you start seeing traffic to an application. Single box is an anti pattern because of no failover etc. move out your db from the web server etc…you could use RDS or something too.

– SQL or NoSQL?
Not a binary decision; maybe use both? A blended approach can reduce technical debt. Maybe just start with SQL because it’s familiar and there are clear patterns for scalability. Nosql is great for super low latency apps, metadata data sets, fast lookups and rapid ingesting data.

So for 100 users…
You can get by using route53, ELB, multiple web instances.

For 10000 users…
– Use cloud front to cache any static assets.
– Get your session state out of the webservers. Session state could be stored in dynamo db because it’s just unrelated data.
– Also might be time for elastic cache now which is just hosted redis or memcached.

Use a product for this, because there are plenty available, and you can focus on what you’re really trying to accomplish.

Create tools to automate so you save your time especially to manage your time. Some of the ones that you can use are: elastic beanstalk, aws opsworks more for developers and cloud formation and raw ec2 for ops. The key is to be able to repeat those deploys quickly. You probably will need to use puppet and chef to manage the actual ec2 instances..

Now you probably need to redesign your app when you’re at the million user mark. Think about using a service oriented architecture. Loose coupling for the win instead of tight coupling. You can probably put a queue between 2 pieces

Key tip: don’t reinvent the wheel.

Example of what to do when you have a user uploading a picture to a site.

When your data tier starts to break down 5-10 mill users
– federation
Split by function or purpose
Gotcha- You will have issues with join queries
– sharding
This works well for one table with billions of rows.
Gotcha- operationally confusing to manage
– shift to nosql
Sorta similar to federation
Gotcha- crazy architecture change. Use dynamo db.

Last week I attended AWS ReInvent in Las Vegas. It was the largest conference I’ve been to with 9000 people, and a crazy number of sessions. When I was trying to decide what sessions to go to, I realized I had multiple conflicts at every slot (a good problem to have). It was also one of the funnest conferences I’ve been to, and I’ll be back next year (a bit more prepared next time around).

I’ll post about the sessions I went to, but the following are my favorite highlights from the conference:

Day 2 keynote with Werner Vogels: After a more marketing and “C” centric keynote on day 1, the day 2 keynote was tuned more to the large developer crowd in the audience, and I left inspired. Check out all my notes here.

Expo Hall: Holy cow! I got tired after walking around just 1/2 this hall. According to the booklet, there were maybe over 170 sponsors, and it took a while to walk through and check out what everyone was doing. The expo hall was also packed the first couple of days, so I went on the 3rd day when things were a lot quieter (pro tip: If you want the best swag, go the first day), but it also gave me a chance to talk to more of the folks in a leisurely manner! My 2 favorite highlights about the expo hall were Datadog (Most enthusiastic even on day 3), and Cloudability (who knew that I was a customer of theirs even though I didn’t realize another team at Mentor used the product; I thought that was pretty awesome!).

Crazy number of sessions: I’m glad these are all on YouTube now. I hear the slides are also going to be online in a bit. This will give me a way to catch up on the sessions that I missed out on.

AWS Hands on labs: This was pretty cool! You could skip a session or two and do a hands on lab on an AWS technology. I spent some time doing a hands on learning AWS beanstalk, and it was totally worthwhile.

Day 1 (Tuesday): I only got in on Tuesday, but next time I’ll need to register in time to be a part of the hackathon or gameday. I talked to a bunch of folks who attended these, and they ended up having a great time at both of these. The Gameday was pretty cool as well and was targeted at DevOps folks. You ended up forming a team with a bunch of other folks and had to build an application infrastructure that was resilient to any kind of breakage. Then, you’d swap your credentials with another team, and they would try to break your infrastructure; you can imagine how this would end up being entertaining!

Meeting up with folks, and catching up with people I hadn’t seen in a while.

VEGAS! It was good to not lose at the roulette tables this time around 🙂

A lot of developer friends commented that the talks were light on technical side of things, which I thought was true; the way I got more out of these was actually talking to the product managers and the customer at the end of the talk to ask and understand some of the more technical concepts. This is true for most conferences, but was especially true for this one.

A quick timeline on standards and js mvc frameworks from 2008 till present.

NewRelic was instrumented to get an overview of performance and performance metrics; the execs asked for a dashboard!! Execs love dashboard 🙂

Step 1: add a cdn; it’s an easy win!
Step 2: The initial idea was to render the easy part of the site first- 90% render.
Step 3: changed this to a single page app

BackboneJS was used to redesign the app to a single page app from the way the app was structured before.

There aren’t great tools for Ajax enabled sites to figure out perf issues. Some of the ones that they used were:
– LogNormal: rebranded as Soasta mpulse
– newrelic
– yslow
– webpagetest
– google analytics (use for front end monitoring, check out user timings in ga)- good 1st step!
– circonus (which is the favorite tool of the presenters)